The Powerhouses of Global Steel Production

English: A view of the former Bethlehem Steel from the Fahy Bridge in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This photo was taken shortly before demolition began to make way for the Sands BethWorks casino project. Jschnalzer 23:29, 31 July 2007 (UTC) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This article takes a look at some of the principal producers of steel across the world and how the profile of the global industry is evolving, with focus moving to the East, both in terms of production and consumption.

In the latter stages of the 20th century, through to the present day, there has been a shift in emphasis within the steel producing industry, from the old powerhouses of Europe, where production has dropped significantly since the 1970s, to the new manufacturing hubs of Asia, with their vast natural resources - including of course the iron ore and fossil fuels required to produce steel. As the industry has become more efficient and reliant on mechanical processes the number of individuals employed by producers has dropped but this effect has been more pronounced in these old powerhouses, demonstrating the relative scaling back of operations. For example, in the EU, employment dropped by 72% between 1974 and 2000, from 996,000 employees to 278,000; whilst in the US it was down by 71% from 521,000.

The following lists the top 3 steel producers in the world using 2012 output figures from the World Steel Association and highlights the changing landscape of the industry.

China

China has emerged as, by a distance, the largest producer of steel across the globe accounting for a whopping 46.3% of the world’s annual production in 2012, according to the World Steel Association. Most countries, witnessed a dip in 2009 due to the economic difficulties but China’s output marched on regardless, rising by 221.6 million tonnes between 2007 and 2012 - a margin in itself double the total level of output of the next main producer Japan. China’s output of 716.5 million tonnes in 2012 was over 4 times that of the entire European Union put together, and over 8 times that of the US. The UK, who sit 18th on the list of global suppliers, meanwhile have an annual output of a mere 9.8 million tonnes, just 1/73 of China’s.

The eastern superpower also claimed to be the top steel exporter in 2011, although not by the same margin due to the size of their internal market and consumption. In total, 47.9 million tonnes left the country in 2011 however due to China’s aforementioned demand for the raw material and their consequent imports of foreign steel, the country slips to 2nd when it comes to the top net exporters, behind Japan.

Japan
In contrast to China, the output from Japan has actually dropped a little in the last 5 years (-11%) but it remains the second highest producing country in its own right (the EU collectively has a higher output), producing around 107 million tonnes. However, Japan does almost catch China when it comes to the amount of that steel that is exported rather than earmarked for internal consumption (40.7m tonnes) and indeed takes top spot as the highest net exporter in the world, above its neighbour. As well as having slightly lower levels of steel imports than China, Japan exports a far higher proportion of its output, around 38% in comparison with China’s 7%.

United States
The US has slipped to 3rd in the pecking order, and, similar to Japan, has been hit by the recession with production levels almost halving between 2007 and 2009, before rallying in 2012 to sit just 10% below 2007’s levels. With output of 88.6 million tonnes in the last year it seems inevitable that the US will be caught and overtaken by India in the next few years as their steel output sits just 12 million tonnes behind, having risen by 43% in the last five years.

Due to the scale of manufacture in the US, the superpower consumes most of its steel internally and thus, as well as sitting far down the table of exporters, holds the position of the worlds primary importer of steel, both in sheer numbers and when offset against their own exports. Only the EU (thanks primarily to Germany) as a collective can claim to import more of the world’s steel than the US.

In summary the global steel markets are witnessing the US and EU moving away from production and instead relying on imports, particularly from Asia, to meet their high levels of demands. China meanwhile, has taken on the role of the industry's megalith, with almost unparalleled natural resources and driven by the need to meet both global demand alongside the manufacturing and building demands of its own mammoth population and internal markets.

To find out more about the state of the global steel industry you can visit this organisation who trades in steel.

A Glossary of Housing Related Terms - Part 1

English: An icon from the Crystal icon theme. Nederlands: Een icoontje van het Crystal icon thema (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Legal rights and regulations concerning housing related matters are most commonly associated with laws surrounding the ownership of property (in its broad legal definition) and more specifically, fixed property (buildings, land, fixtures and fittings etc), known as real estate in some jurisdictions. The following article aims to provide an introduction into some of the key terms that are involved in property and therefore housing law.

Landlord
The owner of any real estate or property (including land) that is rented (i.e., leased – see below) by another party. In some scenarios the landlord can be the party who rents the property from the party who has personal ownership of it, and in turn subleases it – in which case they will still have superior title to that property over the underlying tenant.

Tenant
A tenant is someone who has hold over something – defined as a tenement – but does not own it. The term is most prominent in housing law where a tenant is therefore someone who rents the use of a property from a landlord. Tenancy comes with rights of occupation over the property concerned, despite the fact that the property is never considered to be under the tenant’s personal ownership.

Lease
A more general term describing a contract requiring payment by a user of something to the owner of that thing, for a certain amount of time. In the context of fixed property or real estate, a lease will commonly be referred to as a rental agreement and will be arranged between a landlord (lessor) and tenant (lessee).

Eviction
The process of removing someone from a property, the term ”eviction” doesn’t describe a specific scenario. Lawful evictions occur where the inhabitant has no legal right to live in the property because they have broken terms of their lease, their lease has expired or someone else has a superior claim to the ownership of the property (including lenders following a default on a mortgage).

Unlawful eviction can occur when these conditions are not met, most commonly when a landlord forcibly removes a tenant without following legal processes, particularly when they have failed to serve to required notice.

Repossession
The process of an owner of a property who has superior title/ownership rights on that property claiming it back into their possession, without going through court. The process can be carried out by a lender where a loan has been secured against property, or by an owner in the case of property being leased out. The legal right to repossess will usually be triggered only by a failure to pay monies due in either case.

In the UK the term is most commonly associated with the reclaiming of a property stake by a mortgage lender in the event of the borrower defaulting on the mortgage (i.e., failing to make repayments).

Squatter
An individual who occupies land or property (usually abandoned or unoccupied before they take up residence) over which they have no legal rights. Depending on the jurisdiction a squatter could be committing either a civil or criminal offence, however, in England and Wales squatting has been classified a criminal offence as of 2012.

To find out more about legal matters surrounding housing issues you can visit a specialist housing law firm.

An Introduction to Cloud Servers & Their Benefits - Part 3: Cost & Deployment

The final instalment of this trio of articles looks at the features of the two cloud server deployment models, public and private, as well as discussing how they can deliver real cost savings to their customers.

Cost Efficiencies
As mentioned previously, the responsive scalability of pooled cloud servers means that cloud services can offer significant cost efficiencies for the end user - the most salient of which is that the client need only pay for what they use. Without being bound by the fixed physical capacities of single servers, clients are not required to pay up front for capacity which they may not make use of, whether it be their initial outlay or subsequent steps up to cater for increases in demand. In addition, they avoid the set up costs which would otherwise be incurred by bringing individual servers online. Instead any set up costs generated when the underlying cloud servers were brought online are overheads for the cloud provider and are diluted by economies of scale before having any impact on their pricing model.? This is particularly the case as many cloud services minimise the effort and expense of specific cloud server and platform configurations by offering standardised services into which the client taps.

Lastly, cloud models allow providers to do away with long term lock-ins. Without the longer term overheads of bringing individual servers online for individual clients and maintaining them there isn’t the dependency on those clients for a return on that investment from the provider’s point of view.

Deployment
There are two common deployment models for cloud services which span the service level models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) described in part one: ?Public Cloud:and Private Cloud.

Perhaps the most familiar to general population, and also the most likely to deliver some of the features and benefits mentioned previously, is the typical public cloud model. This model utilises the large number of pooled cloud servers located in data centers, to provide a service over the internet which members of the public can sign up for and access. However, the exact level of resource - and therefore capacity, scalability and redundancy - underpinning the each public cloud service will depend on each provider. The underlying infrastructure, including servers, will be shared across all of the service’s end users whilst the points at which the service can be accessed are open to anyone, anywhere, on any device as long as they have an internet connection. Consequently, one of the model’s key strengths, its accessibility, leads to its most prominent weakness, security.

Services which need to implement higher levels of security can instead use private cloud models. The architecture of private clouds can vary but they are defined by the fact that the cloud is ring-fenced for the use of one client. Servers can either be located in a data center, and accessed via leased lines or trusted provider networks, or on the client’s premises, and accessed by secure local network connections. They can be provisioned as either physical or virtual servers, but they’ll never be shared across multiple clients. Access to the servers and the cloud service will always be behind the client’s firewall to ensure that only trusted users can even attempt to use it.

Private clouds, therefore, offer greater levels of security (depending on the exact set up), but utilising smaller pools of servers means that they cannot always match the economies of scale, high capacities, redundancy and responsive scalability of public cloud models. Although, these qualities can still be achieved more readily than more traditional fixed capacity server configurations on local or trusted networks.

For more information and insight on cloud computing, cloud servers and other related services you can visit this cloud infrastructure provider’s site.

An Introduction to Cloud Servers & Their Benefits - Part 2: Scalability & Reliability

Having, in the first part of this article, described what cloud servers are and how they work within the context of cloud computing, the following instalments go on to discuss how they generated some of the key features that drive the adoption of the cloud at both a personal and enterprise level. This instalment covers the two performance related benefits of scalability and reliability.

Scalability
By combining the computing power of a significant number of cloud servers, cloud providers can offer services which are massively scalable and have no limiting capacities. With hypervisors pulling resource from the plethora of underlying servers as and when needed, cloud services can be responsive to demand so that increased requests from a client’s particular cloud service can be met instantaneously with the computing power that it needs. There is no issue with functions being limited by the capacity of one server and therefore clients having to acquire and configure additional servers when there are rises in demand. What’s more, with cloud services, where the product has already be provisioned, the client can simply tap into the service without the costs and delays of the initial server set up that would otherwise be incurred.

For those clients whose IT functions are susceptible to large fluctuations in use, for example websites with varying traffic levels, pooled cloud server resource removes the chance of service failure when there are spikes in demand. Additionally, on the flip side, it removes the need to invest in high capacity setups - as contingency for these spikes - which would go unused for a large proportion of time. Indeed, if the client’s demands fall, the resource they use (and pay for) can also reduce accordingly.

Reliability - Redundancy & Uptime
As mentioned the high number of cloud servers used to form a cloud service offering means that services are less likely to be disrupted with performance issues or downtime due to spikes in demand. However, the model also protects against single points of failure. If one server goes offline it won’t disrupt the service to which it was contributing resource because there are plenty other servers to seamlessly provide that resource in its place. In some cases, the physical servers are located across different data centres and even different countries so that there could conceivably be an extreme failure causing a data centre to go offline without the cloud service being disrupted. In some models, back ups are specifically created in different data centres to combat this risk.

In addition to unforeseen failures, pooled server resource can also allow maintenance - for example, patching of operating systems - to be carried out on the servers and networks without any disruption or downtime for the cloud service. What’s more, that maintenance, as well as any other supporting activities optimising the performance, security and stability of the cloud servers will be performed by staff with the relevant expertise working for either the cloud service provider or the hosting provider. In other words, the end user has no need to invest in acquiring that expertise themselves and can instead focus on the performance of the end product.

For more information and insight on cloud computing, cloud servers and other related services you can check out this blog from a cloud industry insider

An Introduction to Cloud Servers & Their Benefits - Part 1: Definitions

The concept of cloud computing appears omnipresent in our modern world as we rely on on-demand computing to manage our digital lives across multiple devices - mobiles, tablets, laptops - whilst at home, in the office or on the move. This trio of articles introduces the key component in cloud computing, the servers that underpin each service and provide the computing resource, as well as describing how they provide some of cloud computing's most notable benefits.

Definitions
Cloud Servers: As mentioned above, can be defined as the servers that are used to provide computing resource for cloud computing. In essence they are servers which are networked together to provide a single pool of computing power which cloud based services can draw resource from.

Cloud Computing: Describes any computing service whereby computing power is provided as a on-demand service via a public network - usually the internet. Broadly cloud services can be categorised using the three following models:

• IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service:
  
  • Pooled physical cloud server and networking resource (without any software platforms). Instead of the user being provided with a single distinct physical server, multiples thereof or shares therein, they are provided with the equivalent resources - disk space, RAM, processing power, bandwidth - drawn from the underlying collective cloud servers. These IaaS platforms can then be configured and used to install the software, frameworks, firmware etc (e.g., solution stacks) needed to provide IT services and build software applications.
• PaaS – Platform as a Service:
  
  • Virtualised software platforms using pooled cloud servers and network resource. These services offer the collective physical resources of IaaS together with the above-mentioned software bundles so that the user has a preconfigured platform on which they can build their IT applications.
• SaaS – Software as a Service:
  
  • Cloud based applications provided using pooled computing resource. This is the most familiar incarnation of cloud computing for most members of the public as it includes any application - such as web based email, cloud storage, online gaming - provided as a service. The applications are built and run in the cloud with end users accessing them via the internet, often without any software downloads necessary.

How Cloud Servers Work
Traditional computing infrastructure models tend to revolve around the idea of single server being used for a particular IT function (e.g., hosting, software applications etc), whether it be that that server is a dedicated server - i.e., for the sole use of that client - or shared across multiple clients. Shared servers may have used the one software/platform installation for all of their IT functions/clients or they may have delivered Virtual Private Servers (VPS) where each client has distinct operating environment which they can configure.

Cloud computing can deliver similar virtualised server environments but they use resource drawn from not one, but a multitude of individual physical cloud servers which are networked together to provide combined pool of server resource. In a sense, it uses a platform that could be considered as a form of clustered hosting whereby the resource demands of an individual client’s IT functions are spread across numerous distinct servers. However, with cloud hosting the resource pool has enough capacity, with sufficient servers, to provide resource which multiple clients can tap into as they need to.

Within the infrastructure of cloud services, cloud servers are networked with what are called hypervisors which are responsible for managing the resource allocation of each cloud server. In other words they control how much resource is pulled from each underlying cloud server when demands are made of the pool of servers, as well as managing the virtualised operating environments which utilise this resource.

For more information and insight on cloud computing, cloud servers and other related services you can check out this blog all about cloud servers and hosting

Cambridge - A Few Interesting Facts

Front of the college Peterhouse on Trumpington Street. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Cambridge is a world famous city and largely for one reason, its university  The institution does indeed dominate the town’s history and continues to shape its profile today; and as a result the town has had a notable impact on the wider culture and wealth of the country for the last 800 years. The following article provides a handful of interesting facts about the city that you may or may not have known already, and that give an idea of its stature.

The Old University
As mentioned, Cambridge and its university are essentially synonymous - the reason that the city has such a global profile. The university is not only one of the top five in the world but can claim an almost unrivalled heritage being as it is the second oldest in the English speaking world, and the third oldest that is still in existence in entirety - behind only Oxford and Bologna. In fact, the institution owes its very existence to a decamping from Oxford in the first place following disputes there between the scholars and the locals. This first groups of incoming scholars can be dated back to 1209 although the university didn't receive its royal charter until 1231. The first of its colleges that we still know today can even be traced back to the 13th century with the founding of Peterhouse college by the Bishop of Ely in 1284.

Scientific Soccer
The modern game of football may have been given its moniker by the other university in Oxford but Cambridge can be considered to have been instrumental in its development. Arguably the first ever game of what we would recognise as football or soccer was played in the centre of the city on Parker’s Piece - a park still popular with locals and students alike. The game in 1848 was the first to use the Cambridge Rules which went on to be a prime influence behind the first ever of set of standardised association football rules 15 years later. What’s more, many of the fundamental tactics that shape the way the game is played to this day can be attributed to the university’s team. The Combination Game, as it came to be known, promoted the idea of each player having a position on the pitch, and a role in the therefore in the team, as well as reliance on the passing of the ball in place of dribbling and charging. These revolutionary changes are taken for granted now but were labelled ‘scientific’ in the 19th century and many have credited their development to the Cambridge University side of 1882.

Granting of City Status
Cambridge had been granted a town charter as far back as the 12th century, however, due in part perhaps to a number of episodes - like the one in which it found itself on the wrong side of the peasant’s revolt in the 14th century leading in turn to a revised charter and more control placed in the hands of the university - as well as the lack of a cathedral, it took until the mid 20th century to gain city status. To the surprise of many who assume that Cambridge is a typical Cathedral city, it still doesn't have a Cathedral and instead falls within the diocese of Ely.

Grant being the Operative Word
It may be well know that the town’s name can be ascribed to its position at the bridge over the famous River Cam - the iconic scene of punting students on a sunny afternoon - but what is perhaps not so well known is that the river actually owes its current name to the town and not vice versa. The Anglo-Saxon name for the river was Granta and the name for the town therefore was Grantabrycge, meaning Bridge over the River Granta. Indeed the Anglo-Saxon abbreviation for the town, as seen on coins minted there, used to be Grant. However, this name has been subsequently corrupted down the centuries to arrive at the modern ‘Cambridge’, whilst the river has since borrowed the ‘Cam’ back. The name Granta is still used to refer to the river in some contexts, including a couple of its tributaries, and traces can be seen in modern place-names such as Grantchester - a village on Cambridge’s outskirts (which is allegedly home to the highest concentration of Nobel Prize winners in the world).

Security Challenges Faced by Cloud Hosting - Handling Data

The final part of this article looks at how and where data is stored or handled and the issues that arise in cloud computing through the process of creating multiple instances of data across multiple server platforms. Cloud computing relies on this mechanism for many of its key benefits but, by doing so, invites further challenges for data security.

Data Protection
Data collection and storage is usually bound by legislation or regulation which varies depending on the jurisdiction under which a service falls. Most prominent regulations, however (e.g., those in the US and Europe) share certain principles in common that demand, for example, that data is collected with the subject’s permission, with their full understanding of what the data will be used for, only if the data is relevant to the stated purpose, only for that stated purpose, with transparency and with accountability. For the subject of the data this should mean that they consent to the service provider collecting data relating to them, they know what data that is, who has access to it and why, as well as how to access it themselves if they want to.

It is therefore paramount for IT service providers, who have stewardship of any data, that they are able to identify where data is stored within those services that they provide, how to access it and whether it is secure. However, the abstraction of cloud services in particular can cause challenges for those who utilise them to store or process data because they cannot necessarily guarantee where this data is at any given time. The physical location and guardianship can be obscured, with data hosting sometimes crossing different sites, geographical boundaries and even jurisdictions.

In such cases where private information is involved, the answer often lies with private clouds employing on-site hosting as mentioned in earlier parts of this article, but there is often a trade off with some of the other benefits of cloud which are discussed below.

Multiple Data Instances
Two of cloud computing’s biggest selling points are that of redundancy and scalability. These are often achieved by utilising multiple servers to provide the underlying computing resource, with, therefore, the data within a cloud service being ultimately stored across these numerous servers. Moreover, cloud structures will also create multiple instances of data across these servers to provide a further layer of redundancy protection. However, the more servers that data is shared across, the greater the risk that this data may be susceptible to security vulnerabilities on one of those servers (e.g., malware, hacks); whilst the more instances there are of a piece of data, the greater the risk (by definition) that that data may be accessed and used by unauthorised users. Essentially, data in one place needs to be protected once, data stored in a 100 places, will need to be protected 100 times.

What’s more, as each server and platform is likely to be shared, particularly in the public cloud model, each data instance may be subject to another security threat introduced, inadvertently or otherwise by the 3rd party users who share the resources. In a private cloud, however, this threat is reduced as the cloud resource exists behind the one organisation's firewall and fewer instances of the data are created in the first place (fewer servers to pool). Consequently there is always a degree of trade off between introducing security risk and the level of redundancy and scalability built into a system (although of course redundancy can prevent data loss in itself). Private clouds may be more secure but with smaller pool of resource they cannot match the levels of redundancy and scalability offered by the vast capacities of public clouds.